my wife susanne and i flew from zürich airport (ZRH) via vienna (VIE) to narita airport tokyo (TYO), leaving on saturday, april 30, 2005 on board of an Austrian Airlines Airbus A319, rsp. Airbus A340-200, arriving in tokyo on sunday may 1, 2005. the flights were easy and convenient.

we spent sunday in tokyo, took the bullet train to odaware on monday and spent two days in the hakone area from where we could see mount fuji. after that, we spent three days in kyoto before we returned to tokyo. on saturday may 8, 2005, susanne flew back to switzerland, while i stayed in chiba for one more week to attend the WWW2005 conference.

chiba and tokyo (may 9, 2005)

on sunday, i met yves serrano, a fellow-worker at the informatikdienste of the ETHZ. we spent monday afternoon at akihabara, the "electric town" of tokyo, famous for its huge selection of the latest hi-tech electronic devices.

chuo-dori in akihabara

electronic stores

akihabara by night

(click on the image for an enlargement)

(click on the image for an enlargement)

(click on the image for an enlargement)

on tuesday, michael schnoz from corporate communication joined us for the conference.

i was quite surprised by the fact that they did not use any computers for registration. instead, they had printed lists of the pre-registered attendees and it took these poor soul quite a while to look up my name even if i was the second attendee on the list. the result was rather long lines at the registration desk.another surprise were the "food coupons": we were supposed to go to one of the surrounding restaurants during tutorial and developers' day. there was a map on the back of the
coupons indicating which restaurants were supposed to accept these coupons. unfortunately, the names of the restaurants were only printed in japanese and i was not really surprised, when all the restaurants we tried on tuesday did not accept the coupons ... (on saturday, we actually found a restaurant that did accept the coupons).

during the main days of the conference, they "served" food at hall 8 - a building with a concrete floor, plastic tables and plastic chairs, but not enough chairs for everyone. the food was provided in a box as shown below. i must admit that i had expected a bit more from a country that claims a high standard culture, old traditions and an event that collects a conference fee of JPY 119000 (approx. CHF 1400 or USD 1200) ...

searching was the dominate subject. about 50% of the sessions were somehow related to search. one of the research areas was natural language analysis (NLA) in order to improve search results. NLA is much more than just spell checking. it may for example include word analysis in order to determine the type of a word in a particular search phrase. the word "train" for example is a noun in the phrase "next train to london", but a verb in "how to train a
dog". successful language analysis could significantly improve the users search experience. there are other areas of research, such as link network analysis in order to find information about a particular person even if there are many persons with the same name.there were also interesting panel discussions related to search, such as "querying the past, present and future". i have a particular interest in the past aspect of search, because i believe we can only find what
has been preserved. there may be more to archiving Web based documents then just periodically crawl the Web and buy lots of disks. i believe we should intentionally archive particular stages of some websites and we should also carefully consider what we remove from the Web and what we may preserve in archives, such as the "ETHZ Web archive". of course, the "WayBackMachine" is a great thing, but we
should not exclusively rely on somebody else's resources and efforts.

semantics starts to become practical. i saw a number of attempts to incorporate semantics into our daily business. this starts with educating people how to properly use CSS in order to bring same base level semantics to our Web documents by using meaningful names and attributes that really are related to the content.there were also some more sophisticated approaches, such as "Thresher", a software that allows users
to extract data from webpages in a structured form by applying semantics to the content.there is a strong relationship between semantics and search, because semantics can significantly improve search results if search engines start to "understand" the content of the documents.

CSS level 3 and XHTML2 are making big progress. members of the W3C presented their current work on CSS level 3 and XHTML2. CSS level 3 will treat documents as grids, similar to the familiar layout of most newspaper. authors can then place their content within this grid. furthermore, there will be support for multiple grids, so the same content can be presented differently on different devices
with different form factors and capabilities and even on different media. while it will take at least until 2007 before CSS level 3 will become a recommendation, the W3C hopes to get review of CSS level 2 done by the end of this year.XHTML2 is the next iteration in the HTML family. it is fully backward compatible with HTML V4.0, so there will be no need to change any HTML V4 compliant documents, which is great news. on the other hand, there will be some significant and exciting new features in
XHTML2. most of all, XHTML2 will support the relationship to the semantic Web by integrating RDF in XHTML2. authors will not have to learn RDF to be able to benefit from it.

W3C announced Mobile Web Initiative (MWI). in his keynote speech during the opening ceremony of WWW2005, tim berners lee announced the Mobile Web Initiative (MWI), which will provide guidelines on how to provide content for mobile devices. it is believed, that in a few years, more people will access the Web with mobile devices than with notebooks or personal computers. therefore it is important to
make sure that content is accessible with mobile devices. this initiative should help and guide authors to do the things right.

i attended the full day tutorial TF03 titled "Web engineering - developing successful Web applications in a systematic way". they defined "Web engineering" as the application of systematic, disciplined and quantifiable approaches to design, production, deployment, operation, maintenance and evolution of Web based software products.

the third day started with a keynote by rob glaser from RealNetworks. after the break, there was a very interesting panel titled "querying the past, present and future: where we are and where we will be".lunch took again place in the very cozy hall 8 where they had another delicious food box ready for us. interestingly, there were lots of empty
chairs available today ...this afternoon, i attended the sessions provided by the W3C. the first one rose high expectations, since it was titled "interaction and the Web: the future browser". i haven't exactly seen the future browser, but the information was very interesting anyway. the adjacent "question and answer" session attracted very few attendees and therefore, the members of the panel had basically ask questions to each
other ...the day ended with the closing ceremony.

the developers' day started with a keynote by makoto murata, titled "one project, four schema languages; medley or melee ?". he presented a project for the japanese government, that he was involved in as an XML expert. he explained how they successfully implemented various schemas and conversion tools which allowed them to have applications that support everything in japanese, but URIs. despite all internationalization efforts by the W3C, japanese URIs still don't
work ...

for the rest of the day, i attended a tutorial titled "current best practices in Web development and design". it was a useful introduction to HTML, XHTML and especially CSS by molly e. holzschlag (see www.webprofessionals.org/www2005/ and www.molly.com).

at the end of the tutorial, i took a test to become a "Certified Professional Webmaster" (CPW), certified by the "World Of Webprofessionals" (WOW).

on may 24, 2005 i received the following message:

Congratulations on successfully passing the WOW Certified Professional Webmaster exam.

i rose a little dispute about the term "Webmaster", because it is used very inconsistently. while they use it for a person, who does Web design and/or develops Web applications, we at the swiss federal institute of technology have defined the three terms "Web editor in chief" for the person, who is (legally) responsible for the content, "Web editor" for those who actually write content and "Webmaster" for those, who administer webservers, such as myself.

the series of Web conferences started in spring 1994 with WWW1 held at CERN near geneva, switzerland. in fall 1994, there was a second conference in chicago, USA. because they stated that there will be two conferences each year, one in europe and one in the US, i did not attend WWW2. but at WWW3 in darmstadt, germany, they announced that in the future, there will be only one conference per year. i managed to convince my boss, that i should attend WWW4 in boston, even if i was already in darmstadt
and from then on, i did attended every Web conference up to today. the table below lists all conferences and provides links to my trip reports as well as links to the official conference website where applicable.

*) note: it is very difficult to get an accurate value for the number of attendees. the numbers are either based on the printed list of attendees where available, on the statement made by the organizers or on my own observations. the number for WWW2 is just an estimation because i missed that conference and i didn't find any numbers on the web.

the graphic below shows the number of attendees for each conference. the colors indicate on which continent the conference took place, see legend below.

legend:

africa

americas

asia

europe

oceania

the animated map below is just a different presentation of the same facts: conference, location and number of attendees. there are two remarkable clusters of locations where the conferences took place, one in the north east of north america, one around central europe. on the other hand, the only continent that has been left out is africa.